View of The Identity of New People in Darcy Ribeiro's Work Brazilian People

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Technium

44/2023

2023 A new decade for social changes

Social Sciences

Technium.

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The Identity of New People in Darcy Ribeiro's Work Brazilian People

Omundsen de Melo Costa Junio, Everton Nery Carneiro Universidade do Estado da Bahia

[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. The present research explores Darcy Ribeiro's contributions about the identity of the Brazilian people, which emerges as an identity of new people, as something that previously had no parallels, since it is the result of the historical processes of colonization and miscegenation.

In this sense, this article uses basic research, based on a qualitative approach, with a search through bibliographical research, to try to understand the identity of a people who went through a process of not recognizing themselves as Portuguese, nor black African and nor indigenous, which is born from the harsh violence provoked at the beginning of the history of terra brasilis, when the colonizers arrived. Key concepts and even Darcy Ribeiro's own bibliography are explored in order to understand the notions of identity, culture, education, emancipation and construction of the Brazilian People. It is assumed, above all, that the Brazilian people, who are not the result of a racial democracy, but of the intersection of the white Portuguese, black African and indigenous matrices originating in the land of Brazil, demanding action in favor of the integration of all these people in the scope of educational training, citizen recognition and the realization of their prerogatives of dignity - in contrast to exclusion and inequalities.

Keywords. Culture. Diversity, Identity, Educación, New people

Introduction

Darcy Ribeiro spent 12 years in exile as a result of the 1964 military coup in Brazil. A tense political climate is combined with strong US propaganda against the government of João Goulart at the time, in view of this Darcy Ribeiro foresees the 'imminent split' of Brazil.

According to him, João Goulart chose not to agree to a civil war in response to a military coup that would have contributed to bring General Costa Silva to power, Ribeiro (2009) points out.

About his history, highlights:

Few figures in Brazil's recent history have their names associated with so many fields of action as Darcy Ribeiro. Anthropologist graduated from the School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo in 1946, he soon began to work in the Indian Protection Service (SPI), where he became head of the Studies Section, starting an activity marked by the combination of scientific production and formulation of public policies - in this case, indigenous policies - that would mark his entire life. In the years that he remained connected to the SPI, Darcy published the results of his ethnological research, Technium Social Sciences Journal

Vol. 44, 521-533, June, 2023 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com

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participated in the creation of the Museu do Índio (Indian Museum), and organized the first graduate course in cultural anthropology held in Brazil, beginning his long list of

"doings, This expression, by emphasizing action and process, allows a precise glimpse of Darcy's self-image, so often expressed by himself, a "hybrid of intellectual and doer,"

"a man of doings. Under the strong influence of Anísio Teixeira, he went to work at the Brazilian Center for Educational Research (CBPE) and closed ranks in defense of public, lay and free schools. The creation of the University of Brasilia (UnB), the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Culture in João Goulart's government (1961-1964), the coordination of the Special Education

Program of Leonel Brizola's government in the state of Rio de Janeiro

(1983-1986) - whose main goal was the implementation of the Integrated Centers of Public Education (Cieps) idealized by Darcy -, the performance at the State Secretary of Special Programs in the second Brizola administration (1991-1994) - where he resumed the Cieps project and organized the State University of the North Fluminense (UENF) -, and his parliamentary activity in the Senate, focused on the preparation of the new Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (LDB), sanctioned in December 1996 and baptized as Darcy Ribeiro Law, are other "achievements" to which he dedicated himself in the educational field, with great impact on the Rio de Janeiro and national scene. This is not to mention his work in shaping the university system in several Latin American countries, as well as in Algeria, during the years he was in exile.

Given the political situation, Darcy Ribeiro decides to leave Brazil, just as the deposed president did, at his home in Uruguay to begin his exile. In Uruguay,

Darcy immediately met his friend Mario Cassinoni, rector of the University of the Republic, where he would continue his research on the Brazilian people, according to Ribeiro (2009).

Darcy Ribeiro, according to Martinazzo, Silva and Luft (2020) is considered one of the greatest intellectuals in the recent history of Brazil for the ingenuity and quality of his work, research and production as an anthropologist, educator and writer. He dedicated his life to observing and documenting the needs of the Brazilian people, especially the poorest, and fighting for a more just and equal life for all through education.

Aware of the instability of teaching in Brazil, the educator decided to participate fully in the organization and management of education. He concluded that the problems of education are far from simple; if they were, they would be solved. His starting point was the New School ideal, influenced by the American educator John Dewey and the Brazilian Anísio Teixeira.

Ribeiro as an educator and heir to the New School follows the ideals for a public, democratic, and lay school, according to Martinazzo, Silva, and Luft (2020).

Darcy Ribeiro, as Ribeiro (2011) clarifies, graduated from the of Sociology and Political Science University of São Paulo, and was mainly influenced by listening to a seminar by Herbert Baldus, who understood that the mission of anthropology was to develop theories about people. In exile, Darcy Ribeiro wrote works thinking about the Latin American scenario, and the Brazilian specificities. In this sense, Grupioni and Grupioni (1997) points out an interview given by Darcy Ribeiro in which he comments on the influence of Herbert Baldus:

I lived in São Paulo as a student at the School of Sociology, with a scholarship and with the income that came from the family. So I had a more or less loose life, and I was deeply influenced by the School of Sociology and Politics, which not only made me read and get to know American sociology, the new currents in the social sciences, but Technium Social Sciences Journal

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also to escape from what I called vagrant erudition, the main ailment of the Brazilian spirit in general and of the mineiro, in particular, which is this attitude of taking culture as something fluid. During the course I identified more with some professors than with others. Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda, for example, was an event for me: he came from Germany and brought a different worldview. The first whiskey I ever drank in my life was given to me by Sérgio, at the Architects' Club. The relationship I had with Pierson and other professors was very formal. Then I got close to Herbert Baldus, a German anthropologist from the Thurnwald School, who had the basic European attitude.

European anthropologists were never anti-evolutionists. This was a North American bias or perversion which was reflected in the prejudice against the work of Morgan, that anthropologist who wrote the most important book in the history of evolution, on which Engels was based to write The Origin of the Family, and which was one of the most widely read books in Europe. This created in the United States a sectarian and puritanical attitude against anyone who disputed the biblical origin. So, without anthropology becoming the biblical anthropology of Adam and Eve, it stopped dealing with theoretical themes, and an excellent, shortsighted, dumb anthropology was created that was capable of doing admirable monographs, studying specific themes such as kinship or mythology, but that thereby gave up its vocation. The vocation of anthropology is to elaborate a theory about the human and about variants of the human, and to improve the discourse of men about men.

It is in this context that Darcy Ribeiro proposes to consider the Brazilian nation and state as not necessarily synonymous. Today, the issues in Darcy Ribeiro's work are able to produce a critique of decolonization of Latin American social thought and build a geopolitics of knowledge according to Ribeiro (2011).

The anthropologist spent most of his life researching and writing about the Brazilian sociocultural formation. In his writings we find subsidies on the Latin American reality and on the participation of Indians, blacks and mestizos in the formation and socio-cultural development of the Brazilian people. Some of his works are considered by him as studies of the anthropology of civilization. The author's many publications have been translated into other languages due to their unique characteristics according to Martinazzo, Silva and Luft (2020).

Darcy Ribeiro was a thinker, anthropologist, scientist, educator, novelist, but above all a political activist. He is concerned with unraveling Brazil as a social problem, understanding the reality itself and the reasons for national problems from the perspective of the non- conformist, Brazilian, Latin American and antiimperialist, using the tools necessary to break with the servility and colonization present in Brazilian thought, clarify Costa and Mendes (2020).

For Darcy Ribeiro it is necessary to overcome the backwardness rooted in national colonialism and dependence, and the interests of the elites - equally subservient and colonized.

It is necessary to build projects that highlight the national riches and vicissitudes. In this sense, his thought, especially his dialectical anthropology is based on heterodox Marxism¹ , despite contextual and temporal constraints, and can serve as an important reading and the key to understand the current situation of the country as reiterated by Costa and Mendes (2020).

1 I use the term "heterodox Marxism" in the sense given by Maurício Tragtenberg in the introduction to the book Heterodox Marxism: "The 'heterodox Marxism' puts into question dogmas accepted uncritically by militants and dialectical theoreticians"

(TRAGTENBERG, 1981, p. 7).

Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 44, 521-533, June, 2023 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com

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Thus, from a bibliographic analysis in systems such as Google Scholar, Scielo and academic journals in general, we seek to establish the concept of identity of new people in the contributions of Darcy Ribeiro. The propositions of his work "O Povo Brasileiro" are highlighted.

It also analyzes how national culture and education relate to each other when thinking about effective access to basic and university education for people on the margins, even the thinking of history and social life in consideration of the particularities of the Latin American territory and the possibilities of combating exclusion and inequalities that extend in national history to the present day.

1. The formation of the brazilian people

About 10,000 years of human history are comprehended in Darcy Ribeiro's analytical efforts. The author elaborates a typology to think about what he calls ancient societies, regional civilizations, and world civilizations, Ribeiro (2011) points out.

In the former, he defines social formations as undifferentiated agricultural villages and nomadic tribes; in the latter, he designates social formations in rural artisanal states as nomadic tribal, theocracy-irrigated empires, slave trading empires, and salvationist empires, Ribeiro (2011) expresses. In the last group he gradually combined more hybrid forms, namely salvationist commercial empires and slave colonialism, commercial capitalism and modern colonialism, industrial imperialism and neocolonialism, socialist expansion; finally, disposing human civilization.

Darcy Ribeiro seems to want to think the problems of Brazil in view of the interface of culture, pointing to the problem of Eurocentrism. Moreover, Ribeiro (2011) considers the junction of the economy, pointing to the forms of class domination that Brazil established in different economic cycles, such as with the Pau Brasil, sugar, mining, cattle ranching, agriculture, coffee, cotton, rubber, industrialization, soybean and wheat.

For Ribeiro (2017), the adoption of foreign cultural elements is not dissociative in itself. Every culture, even the most stable, is permanently involved in this replacement of values, techniques, and equipment, made archaic in the social development itself. However, this replacement must take place freely and with sufficient time, so that the group can select what is suitable and learn to replace it and be able to adapt, to progressively work on redefining itself in terms of cultural values.

The challenge of writing "O Povo Brasileiro" led him to criticize the process of civilization. The focus revolves around cultural issues, with concepts such as racial matrix, world confrontation, progress of civilization, creation of man, brotherhood, skin color, prejudice, race, racial transfiguration, Brazilian Creole, caboclo, sertanejo, caipira, structuring social and Brazilian politics and its cultural dimension, according to Ribeiro (2011). In this sense, it is pointed out:

"The Civilizing Process" (1968) is an essay developed as a prerequisite requirement for understanding and classifying in relation to each other the diverse human contingents that have come together to form today's American societies. Such studies enabled a critique of European-bred theories of sociocultural evolution, and a closer look at the way in which diversely developed societies interact. According to Darcy's non-neutral view, he sees the scheme of evolutionary stages of human societies from his American navel of a new, Brazilian, colonized people, always dependent on the metropolis to be, always owing someone. According to his concepts of evolutionary acceleration and Technium Social Sciences Journal

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historical actualization, ways by which peoples evolve, or can fall into regression and stagnation of their technological, social and ideological systems, Latin America has always suffered the effects of an actualization. Historical actualization works like this:

a more developed society subjugates another and imposes its ideological, technological and social systems on it. This subjugation can be through military force, embargoes and economic sanctions, collaborating in coups d'état, through loans never to be repaid (what matters is interest and eternal dependence), through the corruption of local elites, through the installation of transactional companies, among many others. (MARIANO;

LÉRIAS, 2010, p. 02).

Darcy Ribeiro highlights the centrality of the critique of decolonization, based on the anticolonial movement, allows to problematize the issue of national identity from the practice between overcoming and denial. These aspects bring him closer to authors such as Manoel Bomfim, Florestan Fernandes, Caio Prado Júnior, Paulo Freire, according to Costa and Mendes (2020).

In this framework, we have the nationally popular matrix of Brazilian social thought, in a plural and interdisciplinary way of using its intellectual and political instruments to think the social order as a starting and ending point, Costa and Mendes (2020) point out. Below is an example of the diversity with which the Brazilian people identify.

Figure. Diversity of Brazilians' color identification

Source: Schwartzman, 1999.

Darcy Ribeiro defends the notion of a new nation born in most Latin

American countries as a result of the deindianization of the Indians, the deAfricanization of the blacks, and the de-Europeanization of Europe. A nation of mestizos, Technium Social Sciences Journal

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who are different from their ancestors of one race or another, and thus a new people, formed by Indians and Africans, mamelucos, caboclos and mestizos, that there is no identity, according to Ribeiro (2011). Darcy summarizes the participation of Indians, blacks and whites in the formation of the new peoples as follows:

The indigenous people contributed, mainly, as the genetic matrix and cultural agent who transmitted their millennial experience of ecological adaptation to the newly conquered lands. The negro, also as a genetic matrix, but mainly as the labor force that generated most of the goods produced and the wealth that was accumulated and exported, and also as an agent of Europeanization, which ensured a complete European linguistic and cultural hegemony in the areas where it predominated. White people played the role of promoter of the colonizing feat, of reproducer capable of multiplying prodigiously, of implanter of institutions that put social life in order; and, above all, of agent of cultural expansion that created in the Americas vast replicas of their homelands of origin, linguistically and culturally much more homogeneous than themselves (RIBEIRO, 1978, p. 72).

For Darcy Ribeiro, Costa and Mendes (2020) point out, the social system on which the Brazilian people are formed is the brotherhood. The Portuguese invaders exploited the traditions of the indigenous tribes. This is seen when they used women as a form of exchange and a way to expand groups and gain allies, by a process of appropriation of the Indians was violent, Ribeiro (2020) states.

About this violence, it is important to highlight:

On one side, the settlers, wanting to put the Indian arms to produce whatever would enricate them, helped by worldly regulars willing to sacramentalize the earthly city, giving to God what is God's and to the king what he claimed. It was a disaster, even where the missions were productive and even profitable for the Crown itself - as happened with the Sete Povos (Seven Peoples) missions in the south, and to the north, in the late Amazon mission - the will of the settler prevailed, who saw in the Indians the labor force he needed to prosper. The amazing thing for those who meditate on this drama today is the vigor of the missionary faith of those holy men, who went as far as subversion in the struggle for their ideal. After compromising without limits, interpreting in a transcendental tone the conquest as a necessary evil, the door to the road that would be opened to the path of faith by the scourge, they came to their senses and began to see their own conniving role. For decades they said no word of pity for the thousands of Indians killed, the villages burned, the children, the women and men enslaved, by the millions. All this they saw silently. Or even, like Anchieta, singing of these exploits in thousands of servile verses. For them, all that pain was necessary pain to color the faces of the dawn, which they saw dawning. Only belatedly did they come to their senses, seeing themselves defeated first in the evangelization, then in the seclusion of the Indians in the missions. However, no historical disaster, no previous utopian project had such an altitude, because no hope had ever been so encouraging and could be carried forward so far, to demonstrate the feasibility of intentionally reconstructing society according to a project. The Jesuit utopia crumbled and the Ignatians were expelled from the Americas, delivering their catechumens to sacrifice and slavery at the hand of the possessing colonists. The same happened with the Franciscans' myriad dream, reduced to the vision of what was the boorishness of the colonial world, steep, wicked and brutish. (RIBEIRO, 2014, p. 63).

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Through kidnapping, total slavery and rape, the first fruits of a mixture were born, nicknamed brasilíndios or mamelucos. They found themselves in an identity dilemma: were they Portuguese? Indian? Or Brazilian?

This situation is an introjection of the double negative that these Brazilians suffer. They were denied by their Portuguese parents, who considered them impure and, because of their interracial marriages, considered an inferior race, were in fact weapons for a plan of expansion and consolidation of colonial rule according to Costa and Mendes (2020), where he also states that at the same time, their matrilineal roots are denied, since Indian women of patriarchal races are widely seen as mere exchange products. Thus, seeking a group identity to stop being a nobody, Brazilians were forced to generate their own identity.

For Darcy Ribeiro, he² is not Brazilian as the sum of the races (indigenous, African and European), but the subtraction of the process of deindianization, de-Africanization and de- Europeanization. It is from this "nobody" of non-Indians, non-Europeans and non-blacks that the hybrids emerge. In short, the Brazilian Indians who intend to become Brazilians are in a vacuum, Costa and Mendes (2020) confirm.

2. National culture and education

Darcy Ribeiro, in his proposal for a critical history, elected technological development as the basic criterion for structuring the sociocultural evolutionary program. A Marxist in his own way, he focuses on the technological revolutions, but knows that they never fully describe the broader and more complex cultural revolutions. He re-reads the originality of Marx and Engels to grasp the logic of the movement of human self-transformation, according to Ribeiro (2011).

In thinking shared values and interests, the ability of a people to explain their situation is a symbolic means that implies their own historical representation. Even if the parameters of social normalization come from the dominant class, there is no need to underestimate the capacity of the subordinate class to reshape the ideas that emerge. Thus, social thought contains the seeds of social creativity, developed or not, with fertile consequences, capable of opposing the status quo, Ribeiro (2011) states.

Darcy Ribeiro, along with his mentor Anísio Teixeira, fought for public education of social reference. The interface between basic and higher education is remembered by the author as the center of attention of scientists and social actors in the construction of emancipation and human transformation, according to Ribeiro (2011).

Darcy Ribeiro criticizes the selective and elitist bias of educational institutions, although most children admitted to school are from the lower classes, they are educated in the same logic of domination that permeates the elites. Therefore, exclusion occurs not only because of the lack of schools and the possibility of attending school, but also because of issues of inequality and social exclusion that occur on a larger scale, at the level of ideology and thought about the national culture according to Martinazzo, Silva, and Luft (2020).

Educational concerns emerged in the researcher's work regarding the issue of the value of school for poor children and the reasons for the failure of education in responding to the demands of reality. In analyzing the historical and social panorama of Brazil, Martinazzo, Silva and Luft (2020), highlight that Darcy tries to show how the idea of school failure cannot blame poor students, by the assertion that these learning "deficiencies" would come from the family.

2 "he" here corresponds to the new people who emerge as a national ethnicity, culturally differentiated from its forming matrices, strongly mestizo. (RIBEIRO, 2014, p. 19).

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Darcy Ribeiro understood that schools do not know how to welcome and recognize children from the less favored classes, which largely explains the negative results. Selective and elitist characters cause poor children to be rejected, on the other hand, children with better financial conditions are seen as those with conditions for future and learning. About this, we highlight:

Comparing illiteracy between the richest and the poorest, based on income distribution, is another way to verify inequalities. Using the same procedure used previously, it was verified that income is a determining element in illiteracy. Thus, it is observed that those who are in the first fifth, the poorest, have an illiteracy rate of 18.7%, while for those who are in the 5th fifth, the richest, the rate is only 2.0%, that is, the illiteracy rate among the poorest is nine times higher than that among the richest. Furthermore, it can be observed from the data presented in the following table that, regardless of the category selected, there is a tendency for the richest to always be better off than the poorest. Only in the rural areas and in the Northeast region does this indicator increase a lot for the richest. Meanwhile, the poorest, in almost every situation, do not manage to get anywhere near the national rate (10%). In discussing illiteracy, the following characteristics were found: (a) it is much more accentuated in the black population; (b) the less developed regions, small municipalities, and rural areas are those that present the worst indexes; (c) it is strongly concentrated in the low-income population; (d) the percentage and quantity of illiterates increase the older the population is; and (e) there is still a considerable number of young illiterates, synonymous with the fact that the educational system is still producing illiterates. Moreover, it was found that the illiteracy rate within the same generation is not very sensitive to changes over the years (CASTRO, 2009, p. 682-683).

Darcy Ribeiro argues that the university should be a political institution, one that produces knowledge with attention to social reality. Therefore, the university should be attentive to the materiality of life, including the country's place in the world economy. It is also important to note that Darcy Ribeiro's proposal for university reform for the UnB has a new bias for Brazilian universities, pointing out that they should be closer to Latin America according to Leher (2017).

It is clear that in the first two decades of the 21st century, education faces a more complex reality and new challenges. Martinazzo, Silva, and Luft (2020), state that, without a doubt, the issue of democratization of education remains a goal that needs to be reached, regarding access at all levels, persistence, and paths to success, as well as the problem of school exclusion caused, among other factors, by social barriers.

It is still pertinent to note Darcy Ribeiro's essay on the need for elementary and higher education, in which he considers that only one and the other, properly combined, can bring a people into modern civilization. In this sense, it is important to note:

A June 2020 survey done by the Brazilian Black Science League shows that among the graduate students, 2.7% are black, 12.7% are brown, 2% are yellow, less than 0.5% are indigenous, and 82.7% are white. The analysis was based on data from the Lattes Platform, a CNPq service that gathers curricular information, research groups and institutions in the areas of science and technology in Brazil. According to Wagner, the data becomes even more overwhelming when one broadens one's gaze outside of Technium Social Sciences Journal

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graduate studies. "There are only 20 black professors working in Communication courses in Rio Grande do Sul. That is, of the 754 professors, only 2.65% are black and mixed race," he says. In Brazil, according to data published by FAPESP's Pesquisa magazine, out of the 80,115 PhD and Master's graduates in 2020, 9,909 are mixed race and 2,746 are black. This data is even more remarkable when we consider that Brazil is the second largest country in the world in terms of black population, second only to Nigeria, in the African continent. However, even though they make up the majority of Brazilians, the desire for whitening still makes the presence of black people in various fields of society unfeasible, including education, Wagner points out. "The effective strengthening of anti-racist education is fundamental, as well as the recognition of the relationship between the silencing of African, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous history and cultures and the Eurocentrism of knowledge." To combat prejudice and the little presence of blacks in science, points out the communication researcher, "the ideal would be to foster the desire for change regarding the relationship between the inferiorization of black identity and the false idea of white superiority. Besides, highlights the journalist, the history reported in books does not tell that the black people managed to free themselves from slavery, even though they were driven to the outskirts of society, driving the marginalization process that today results in several indexes in the country.

He lists that black people are more likely to be murdered, are a majority in the prison system, have lower pay, and less access to health and education services than whites.

"The result is structural racism - a term used to describe societies founded on the privilege of some races over others," summarizing that the lighter the skin, the greater the tendency to ascend. "With this, black people were, for a long time, and still are, at the margins of science. There is no belonging of this ethnic group in the universities, and the few who manage to enter this space of power are often subjugated," he points out. (HANZEN, 2021)

Darcy Ribeiro proposes an evolutionary acceleration. The idea of acceleration is first of all an acceleration that predicts future time, emphasizing the teleological and constructive role of social forces rather than adaptation. What is interesting to note is that in the case of evolutionary acceleration, it does not mean the impossibility of its analysis in reality.

By evolutionary acceleration we mean the development processes of societies that autonomously renew their productive system and reform their social institutions in the sense of transition from one to another model of socio-cultural formation, as peoples that exist for themselves (Ribeiro, 1975a, p. 44).

Darcy Ribeiro is driving an evolutionary acceleration in a movement to gather forces to build a national will be capable of changing the reality of Brazil, believing that the country can have a prosperous education, based on technology, sciences, with attention to society. In fact, according to Leher (2017) Darcy Ribeiro, when considering the field of culture and education, was dissatisfied with a Brazil, where blacks, indigenous people, peasants, among other minorities were placed at the margins of the country.

3. The concept of identity in Darcy Ribeiro

The formation of an identity structured by the interpenetration of cultures resulting from the European expansion would have conformed three types of peoples in America: the

"Testimonial peoples", modern descendants of the autonomous Aztec, Mayan and Inca civilizations - Mexicans, Guatemalans, Bolivians, Peruvians, etc; the "new peoples" that derive Technium Social Sciences Journal

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from the junction, in the colonial enterprise, of whites, blacks and Indians, a predominant situation in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, the Antilles, etc; the "transplanted peoples", corresponding to the modern nations created by the migration of European populations - Canada, the United States, Uruguay and Argentina, according to Ribeiro (2021).

History and dialectical materialism guide and unify the narrative of Darcy Ribeiro, this, in order to mark the pluralism, interdependence and simultaneity of the processes that make up human society. Contrary to the dichotomy of modern representations, civilizational processes articulate a multitude of concrete sociocultural formations and synchronicities that question the false hierarchies of the colonizers according to Leher (2017).

According to Ribeiro (2011) the Brazilian is born in the process of distinction from his original and even hostile matrix. The Mameluk refuses the Indian mother who gave birth to him and opposes his brothers, while his white father does not know him, thus he feels exiled in his own land.

There is a contradiction in the identity of the indigenous people³ Brazilians known as mamelucos by the Spanish Jesuits, a term originally referring to the slave caste that the Arabs took from their parents, this is an example of what the national identity implies, born of violence, contrasts, and pluralities according to Ribeiro (2011).

The term "nobody" in Darcy Ribeiro's thought appears in "O Povo Brasileiro" to explain how the identity of the "Brazilian" that is defined by its mestizo nature. Being Portuguese, aboriginal and African, he does not consider himself to be them or to be seen as similar by them, that is, he constitutes himself as a nobody according to Costa and Mendes (2020).

The formation of identities and, therefore, of subjectivity is influenced by specific material foundations on which the economic policies and sociocultural formations of the national territory are formed. Subjectivity and identity are considered to constitute:

Subjectivity is understood as that which concerns the individual, the psychism or its formation, that is, something that is internal, in a dialectical relationship with objectivity, which refers to what is external. It is understood as process and result, something that is broad and that constitutes the uniqueness of each person (...). According to Leontiev (1978b), subjectivity refers to the process by which something becomes constitutive and belonging in the individual; occurring in such a way that this belonging becomes unique, singular. (SILVA, 2009, p. 170;171).

Thus, according to Darcy Ribeiro, Brazilians only became aware of themselves, at least in terms of who they were, how they saw and conceived themselves before the world, when millions of people became detached from their roots.

Although they carry in their genetic and social cultural heritage this ancestry, they are no longer connected to their ancestors in an identity and subjective way, as if they were just continuity, even if they have been rejected by them and reject them. As a result, they begin to feel empty and forced to settle into race and identity according to Costa and Mendes (2020).

To conjugate the thought about Brazil, we can establish a relationship between the works of Guimarães Rosa (Grande sertão veredas) and Darcy Ribeiro (O Povo Brasileiro),

3 I use the term "indigenous peoples" here, but I could also use "original peoples", because it is a way of recognizing the identity of these peoples, as both terms better cover all the richness and ethno-cultural diversity existing among the indigenous people who were here before the arrival of the Portuguese.

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which move through a scenario of political instability, with alternating periods of normality, revolutions, military coups, and dictatorships.

The two authors move from an agrarian country to an industrial one, from a literature of European descent to a Brazilian one. They try to create a new world, making a rediscovery of Brazil, to make the country something different. One has a more literary position (Rosa), and the other has a more political, anthropological and sociological position (Darcy).

Says the poet:

You... Look: the most important and beautiful thing in the world is this: that people are not always the same, not yet finished - but that they are always changing. They tune out or tune in. Bigger truth. This is what life has taught me. This makes me very happy (Rosa, 1994, p.24-25).

Says the anthropologist:

(...) in spite of everything, we are a province of Western civilization. A new Rome, an active matrix of neo-Latin civilization. Better than the others, because washed in black blood and in Indian blood, whose role, from now on, less than absorbing Europeanness, will be to teach the world to live happier and more joyful. (Ribeiro, 2014, p. 265).

Concluding remarks

This research emphasized the notion of identity of "new people" in Darcy Ribeiro's contributions about the formation of the Brazilian people. It pointed out historical, social and critical contributions of the formation of the national population since the violence present in the relations between Indians, Africans and Portuguese.

The formation of the Brazilian identity, as treated here, was also structured by the negation of other identities and cultures, a movement arising from the very course of human practices in the previous periods of history.

In this sense, issues such as exclusion and inequality in the national formation and the role of education - basic and university - in the construction of a national culture were also evidenced. Thus, it was possible to perceive that the Brazilian people have their identity formed, by the roots of the matrixes that are found in Brazilian territory in a time and space that will no longer be possible to happen in history, characterizing this people as unique, a true "new people"

that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.

The position of education as a mechanism for emancipation and self reflection on the constitution of the national identity, which relies on the participation of Indians, blacks, and mixed race people in the formation and sociocultural development of the Brazilian people, was also made evident.

The questions of the identity dilemma of the Brazilian people: Portuguese? Indian? Or African? They are answered in the research and analysis effort that the unique socio- anthropological work of Darcy Ribeiro elaborates to confirm that we are dealing with a unique people, the result of the miscegenation of three different matrices, but that in their contact over 500 years, resulted in a new people who can be recognized as the Brazilian people.

References

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